Dialogues of the Dead: Part 1

A short story competition has been organised to mark the opening of a refurbished library and a new Heritage Centre. The entries are handled by the library staff, and one of them is so graphic that it leads the police to reconsider a recent fatal accident they had treated as an accident. From that point each killing is accompanied by a further submission to the competition. The killer writes a dialogue after each death, describing the killing in detail and including hints and clues. The documents are confident, well written and illustrated, and they are delivered in the knowledge that the police will read them. The first such entry prompts the reopening of the earlier death, and the later ones describe killings the police have not yet identified as murders.

Wetherton CID works out that the killings follow the alphabet. The first victim is connected to the letter A, the next to B, and so on, so that each new entry tells the police where the next death will fall. That is the working method rather than a settled fact. The killer is given the name the Wordman in the source material, and the published summaries of the television version describe him or her simply as an eloquent serial killer whose calling cards are the written entries. Detective Constable Hat Bowler is sent to the county library after the submissions are reported and becomes involved with Rye Pomona, one of the librarians who has been handling the entries and judging the competition. His interest in her is personal as well as professional, and it gives the killer a route to the police. Dalziel works out that the deaths are connected to the death of David Lyttelton, a student who was killed in a car crash aged sixteen.

The story is the first half of a two-part adventure transmitted on consecutive nights in December 2002, and it is the only story in Series 7 to be adapted from a novel rather than written for television. It is also the point at which the series changes its shape for the run it has left, since this is the first two-part story in the programme's history and the model that Series 9 onwards uses for every story. The written submissions are an unusually literary device for a police series, and their effect is to make the audience read the same documents the police read, in the same order, with the same absence of context.

The alphabet structure is the episode's engine and its joke, because a killer who announces where he will strike next should be easy to catch and is not. The Bowler strand is the part that matters for the series going forward, because it introduces both the character and the relationship the second part turns on. As the first half, this episode ends without naming the killer or resolving the case, and the published record carries the solution into the following night's part.